And what have I got to say for my reading and viewing for 2008?
- 147 books, comics and scripts were picked up and read, all bar 19 right through, with the most memorable being:
- Pamela Douglas‘ Writing the TV Drama Series, Mark Haddon‘s A Spot of Bother and Ruth L Ozeki‘s My Year of Meat;
- Kyle Baker‘s Plastic Man on the Lam!, Laurence Hyde‘s Southern Cross, Jason‘s* The Living and the Dead, Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel‘s The Quitter, Joe Sacco‘s Palestine, Stan Sakai‘s Usagi Yojimbo, Marjane Satrapi‘s Persepolis, and Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra‘s Y: The Last Man;
- Phillipe Claudel‘s I’ve Loved You So Long, Frank Darabont‘s Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and William Norris‘ H.P. Lovecraft’s The Reanimator, Frank Nugent‘s The Searchers, M Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening, and Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond‘s Some Like it Hot.
- 113 features and television series were watched on a screen, with 20 stopped part-way through, the most memorable being:
- The Closer Season 3, Escape to River Cottage, Matthew Weiner‘s* Mad Men Season 1, Te Radar‘s Off the Radar, Shawn Ryan‘s The Shield Seasons 4-7, Sports Night (*), and David Simon‘s The Wire Seasons 3-5;
- The Dead Girl, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Moonstruck, A Scanner Darkly, Shoot ‘Em Up, The Squid and the Whale, and Waitress.
Yep, my book readin’s waaay down, but I’ve recently rediscovered it over the break with three (non-picture) books on the go. (But will I finish them?).
Hardcopy scripts were courtesy of the guild‘s Timpson Collection. Softcopies, as always, were courtesy of Don at Simply Scripts.
It was a very quiet year for film watching. How quiet? I’ve only seen two films apiece in Roger Ebert‘s 2008 picks and Lynden Barber‘s faves.
Maybe that was because 2008 was a year for a lot of box watching. While some people mourn the loss of Bionic Woman, and The Sopranos, I’ve got my own problems with the end of The Shield and The Wire. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad they finished when they did: better to choose your terms of departure than overstay your welcome.
The universe shall provide.
